Microtonal Narratives in Literature
Alice Scarlet Death
When you hear the term microtonal, your first assumption would be in relation to music. Studying the sounds between sounds. Let’s translate that to how we write after the jump.
It might sound like I’m just talking about context, which might not be too far away from microtonal literature. First, let’s explore the themes of context and how it differs.
Context is one of the most important things in writing. It allows the writer to know where they are. Show someone a picture of Superman who’s never heard of him. (Work with me here.) The recipient would not understand the struggle of having to switch between jobs and the psychodrama of having to pretend to be two separate people. Or deal with the fact one side of yourself has a girlfriend and the other one doesn’t. Spiderman does this too.
Context is the thought between the lines whereas microtonal writing has more of a basis with non-sequitur language than anything else.
After thoroughly reading Finnegan’s Wake and not making any sense of it on my own, I turned to reviews to try to figure out exactly what was happening. As it turned out, you had quite a bit of mental gymnastics to follow along.
These types of novels are generally considered stream of consciousness. However, this refers to the method of creation. The intent, or lack thereof. The delivery method is the stream, but the words on paper end up being microtonal.
What I’m proposing is that we take a look into the semiotics of graphemes. Translation: the study of symbols regarding individual letters.
Imagine each letter as a musical note. But then you leave out a letter or two. Your brain fills in the gaps. It happens fast. Each letter is being processed as its own entity in your mind. It comes up with a huge list of words that start with that letter. Then it adds another letter and so on, all the while your brain is still processing each individual letter. So when you see a word, even with a letter out, your brain generally has seen that letter enough to fill in the blanks.
Consider the Burger King logo. We all see it and automatically think Burger King. However, if we took away the outer blue curved line, would you still know it was Burger King? You probably would.
Microtonal writing is the art and practice of manipulating the empty spaces and the left out words with enough surrounding sensible words to where you can still understand it. You are reading between the lines.
I don’t view words as words. I view them as a cluster of individual symbols. Then I view a sentence of the summation of each cluster. This is how words and sentences can be microtonal.
This isn’t like you’re trying to mask what you’re saying. You’re just manipulating your reader into putting more thought into every word and sentences juxtaposed against others just to see if there’s missing context or other ideas.
“How do I make the least amount of sense on paper, but also the most amount of sense in reader’s minds” – Me
